Ratan wanted to be a writer. It was not his childhood wish, but a sudden desire. Two of his friends were established in Bengali literature. One of them was Bimal Bose, a whimsical poet. The other was Sunil Bera, a novelist.

He was encouraged a lot by these two young guns. Ratan sometimes penned poems, but when it came to stories, he hit a roadblock. He always feared that his story might have some similarity with the stories he had read before.

One day Ratan was writing a story on the ghosts of Bengal. After reaching the midpoint, a feeling of suspicion began to irritate him. He stopped writing and read it from the beginning. His fear was justified. It had a subtle similarity with a Shirshendu Mukherjee novel whose name he could not recall.

Another time he started to write a fable with the following sentence, ‘Once upon a time, there lived a king’. He could not proceed anymore because he had heard these words somewhere.

Ratan was very anxious about this. He told his two friends about his problem but they did not seem to bother. They told him that it was nothing serious. Sunil advised him to think about these things only after completing a story. Bimal reasoned that many writers wrote about the same things. They would definitely help him to overcome it if Ratan showed them his stories.

That day Ratan was stunned to read a piece in a little magazine. The central character of the story also suffered from the same anxiety.

Ratan looked at the name of the writer. It read, ‘Maharghya Tarkalankar’. He understood that it was the work of either Sunil or Bimal. This type of name was obsolete in Bengali. It must be a non de plume used by either of them.

Ratan quarrelled with his friends a lot. He was more exasperated to notice that none of them owned up to it.

He was extremely hurt that his character was copied by the same person who had promised to help him in writing original stories.

Ratan wrote a letter to the editor of the magazine expressing his anger.

In reply, he got the following letter:

‘Dear Ratan,

You have wasted my valuable time with baseless allegations. The story was an unpublished work of my grandfather Late Maharghya Tarkalankar, penned fifty years ago.

I request you to never bother me again.

The Editor

Kalarab magazine.